Philip Gooden - The Salisbury Manuscript

‘And meanwhile Walter grew up believing that Felix was his uncle and Amelia was his aunt?’ said Tom.

‘It is an extraordinary situation, is it not?’

But there had been little signs and pointers, thought Tom, there’d been puzzling moments which were now explained.

Such as the affectionate way that Amelia had bade farewell to Walter in the porch of Venn House the first time he’d encountered them. or the young man’s reference to her as not being especially ‘aunt-like’, which Tom had taken as being no more than a comment on her age and manner. Then there had been Percy Slater’s odd attitude to his ‘son’, the dismissive way he’d talked about him. Tom had put it down to disapproval of Walter’s decision to go into the Church and to lodge with Felix.

But, regarded in this new light, the situation suddenly became plain. Felix’s saying that Walter was just the son he would like to have was the nearest he had come to admitting the truth. There was a kind of daring hypocrisy in the statement. Similarly, hadn’t Canon Slater mentioned his happiness when Walter came to live with him? With them , of course, with the unacknowledged father and mother. What was Amelia Slater’s attitude to all this? She must surely have been delighted to have her son under her own roof for the first time. What was her part in all of this? How easy or hard had she found it to remain silent all these years? Was it part of the understanding between the couple that she should never refer to Walter’s true parentage?

He was suddenly aware that a silence had fallen and that Helen and Eric Selby were looking at him curiously. Rapidly, he explained how the story they’d just heard had thrown light on several small incidents or remarks which he’d noticed since his involvement with the tangled affairs of the Slater family. He had one final question for Canon Selby.

‘Do you think that George Slater, the father, was in on the secret?’

‘Who can tell, Tom? It is possible he was kept in ignorance. His older son lived in London while George did not, by all account, have much to do with the younger one. Perhaps he also took Walter for the son of Percy.’

‘Why do you ask, Tom?’ said Helen.

‘Because if George Slater did know, then he might have made some reference to it in his manuscript, his memoir.’

And, Tom thought without saying it out loud, that might have been a motive for the theft of the Salisbury manuscript and the murder of Felix.

Running over the events of this dramatic day as he lay, restless, in his bed at The Side of Beef, Tom Ansell realized how the revelation of Walter’s parentage had shaken everything up. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope. New patterns emerged. But they were ugly patterns, with a bloody red and a jealous green the predominant colours.

Canon Slater emerged in a new light. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a flattering light or not. The passion that had run in his veins hadn’t simply been for the artefacts of the past. He had once, in his younger days, been the lover of a woman — a girl, in fact, for Amelia could have been little more than that when they met in Florence by the Arno — a girl whom he had got with child, as the expression goes. Tom wondered whether the Canon’s preoccupation with the past, with digging up remains, was somehow related to his having buried the scandalous part of life, if only as a kind of reverse image of it. Then he recalled Slater saying that he’d always been interested in disinterring the past from his earliest days, that he’d enjoyed fossicking round the Downton estate as a child. Well, Felix Slater was dead now and there’d be no more fossicking.

If there’d been a shortage of suspects or motives for the murder of Canon Slater before, there were now several to be drawn directly from Felix’s own family.

Tom had scarcely known his father — not much more than a tall man in a blue uniform, as he’d described him recently to Henry Cathcart — but at least he could recognize him as a father. He tried to put himself inside the mind of a man of about the same age as himself who, with brutal suddenness, discovers that the gentleman and lady he’s been brought up to treat as his uncle and aunt are his actual parents. It was as if he’d discovered that the man his mother had taken for a second husband — Martin Holford, a kindly but somewhat aloof figure who’d steered Tom into his career in law — was revealed to be his actual father. How would he, Tom, respond? Disbelief at first, yes. And then. . what? The effect would surely be overwhelming.

Walter’s reaction had been a compound of anger and dismay. His immediate instinct had been to run away from Venn House and hide himself in the comforting surroundings of St Luke’s. But had that really been his immediate instinct? Had he rather been driven by fury or distraction to go straight to Venn House and confront the man now revealed as his father? Did he kill the cleric while his mind was turned by the news, and then flee to the shelter of the bell-tower?

Tom thought again. If Walter Slater had endured a distraught encounter with Felix, then there would have been the sounds of it reverberating round the household on the evening of Felix’s death. Raised voices and angry tones would have been overheard by the servants. And by Mrs Slater too, surely. Unless she was somehow involved in her husband’s death, an accomplice to his murder. Tom had a vision of Walter storming into the house and confronting his mother. Of tears and embraces coupled with garbled explanations and infinite regrets, while anger bubbled away underneath. Had they together gone to see Felix? Together brought about his death?

The strain on Amelia over the years must have been immense too. If Walter had been subject to a violent shock, she had had to endure many years of pain. To have surrendered her son all those years before and then to have him return home as a kind of guest, but without being able to acknowledge him for who he was, must have added to an almost intolerable burden.

But even as Tom’s imagination painted the picture of an anguished mother, he wondered whether it was so after all. What he’d seen of Amelia Slater suggested a coolness, a detached and half-amused attitude to things. She didn’t look as though she might be carried away by a sudden rage. Yet one of the things that Tom had learned even in his brief time as a lawyer was that there was no predicting human responses. The most passionate and vehement person might take an insult or shock with equanimity, while the meekest of individuals could suddenly lash out in fury.

If Amelia Slater hadn’t herself been the murderer, however, that did not mean she might not be covering up for her son’s action. For the first time in her life she might have acted in truly maternal, protective fashion. Another picture: Amelia entering Felix’s study and seeing Walter standing over her husband’s body and — understanding and forgiving everything in an instant — giving him the time to make his escape before she ran out with her maid into the fog and darkness of the West Walk to raise the alarm.

There was a third member of the Slater family to consider. Percy Slater had travelled from Downton to Salisbury on the day of his brother’s murder — and shortly after Tom had called on him — to find Walter and to put the record straight, as Eric Selby had expressed it. If Walter had indeed gone on to kill his father, then Percy bore part of the blame for the manner in which he had revealed to the truth to his nephew. He, too, must have lived for years with the weight of deception, with the pretence that the boy who’d known him as a father was no son to him. All that time, his resentment at his pious and holy brother must have been simmering. According to Canon Selby, Percy had on several occasions come close to revealing the truth. That he had finally done so without warning, on a fog-bound afternoon, was perhaps the least surprising thing of all.